An
Analysis of the Concept of Time in the Confessions,
Book 11 by Augustine of Hippo

by Eric Rosenfield

In
1917, Albert Einstein completed work on the
General Theory of Relativity, one
of the rules of which states that time is fundamentally bound to
matter and gravity, and that without matter there would be no time.
Oddly, this concept was presaged almost 1,300 years before that when
Bishop Augustine of Hippo (later St. Augustine) put forth the idea
that when God created the Heavens and the Earth, he created time
itself as well. Before Augustine, no one that we know of had tried to
consider "time" as being something changeable, something
that could start and stop; after all, we always perceive time as
moving forward, and contemplating temporality as being finite or
malleable seems unnatural, and the implications headache-rousing.
Plato and Aristotle both regarded time as being infinite. Yet it was
Augustine's application of the methods of the principles of Grecian
philosophy and reason to the Christian concept of God that forced him
to arrive at his conclusions.

In
the first sentence of Book 11 of the Confessions,
the book that deals with
time, Augustine presents to us the commonly held Christian
belief that God is eternal. Then, like a good philosopher, Augustine
begins applying reason to this idea. If God is eternal then he does
not take action at individual moments in time, because he does not
exist in individual moments in time. He is literally outside time,
and only his agents – the angels, who exist in time – can
carry out his will on Earth. Yet if God is outside of time, then how
could he have made the Heavens and the Earth in the
beginning, as claimed in Genesis
(since "the beginning" is inherently a point in time). For
instance, John 1:1 holds that in the beginning there was the
Word and the Word was made form, or as Augustine relates "Thou
didst speak and they were made, and by thy Word thou didst make them
all". Yet what was that Word that created the Universe? Surely,
the words of an eternal being do not sound and die out like the words
of us mortal folk - "If then, in words that sound and fade away
thou didst say that Heaven and Earth should be made, and thus madest
Heaven and Earth, then there was already some kind of corporeal
creature before Heaven and Earth by whose motions in time that
voice might have had its occurrence in time. But there was nothing
corporeal before the Heaven and the Earth." In other words, if
God is eternal than his words could only have a length in time if
they were made to be "heard" by something that experiences
time – because God doesn't. Therefore, because there was
nothing before God created the Heavens and the Earth, then the Word
did not start and stop as human words do, but instead exists
eternally, as does God Himself. Indeed, because the Heavens and the
Earth must've been created outside
the Heavens and the Earth (for obvious reasons), the very creation of
Creation is outside of anything that could experience time, and
therefore "the Beginning" of the Bible is not
actually a beginning at all, but an immutable eternal, the eternal
Word, the eternal Truth, the eternal God, and so according to
Augustine, "He is the Beginning, and speaketh to
us" (emphasis mine, notice the tense).

Therefore,
the question that some ask Augustine, "what was God doing before
He created the Heavens and the Earth" is completely
inapplicable. To an eternal being the word "before" holds
no meaning – there literally was no before God
created the Heavens and the Earth, or as Augustine puts it "for
there was no 'then' when there was no time" - "There
was no time, therefore, when thou hadst not made anything, because
thou hadst made time itself".

There
are some obvious problems with this interpretation of Genesis as
an interpretation of Genesis. If
God created the universe outside of time, and God is eternal in the
way that Augustine describes, then why is the creation of the
universe in the Bible divided up into days, an explicitly temporal
measurement? Why would creation need to be divided up at all,
why would the eternal act of creation not simply breath life into the
whole shebang at once, and even more importantly, why would an
eternal God need to rest? Augustine sort of implies an answer for
this when he says, in a different context, "[God's] years are
but a day, and [God's] day is not recurrent, but always today."
But saying that God's day is always today doesn't really explain why
the Bible says that it took Him "6 days" to make
everything. Augustine never actually tackles this head-on, and one
can't help but suspect that's because his answers might have been
heretical (especially considering the constant overtures to God's
help and statements that all this work is done to merely discover the
Truth of God to be found interrupting the proper narrative throughout
Book 11, which seems to imply that Augustine was worried about a
possible heresy charge).

But
then, what's really strange about Augustine's interpretation of the
eternal nature of the Beginning is that, when taken entirely apart
from the Bible, it resonates not only with Relativity (Augustine
saying that for the Word to happen in time there must have been
something that experiences time being roughly analogous to Einstein
saying that matter and time are linked, and without one you would not
have the other) but also with modern Big Bang Theory. Briefly,
according to Big Bang Theory, because matter and time are so
inextricably bound, when all the matter in the universe was
compressed into a single point it formed what's called a "quantum
singularity" in which, the math shows, the curvature of time and
space became infinite. This means the Big Bang singularity exists at
all times at once, in all places at once much like Augustine's God -
the singularity that created the universe is all around us, all the
time, forever.[1]
Of course, it's not a perfect correlation, since whether a quantum
singularity wants to offer us salvation through its divine grace,
like Augustine's God, is another question entirely.

Moving
forward in Book 11, Augustine then asks "what exactly is time?",
and says, somewhat comically, "If no one asks me, I know what it
is." We know that time, he states, has three parts – the
past, the present and the future. And yet, we also know that the past
and future don't actually exist, since we can in no way interact with
them except when they are the present. That is to say, if the past
and the future exist in the physical way that the present does, we
have no way of knowing it, because we only experience the present.
And yet, if the past and future don't exist, then what exactly are we
measuring when we measure time? Obviously, time itself exists, since
it can be measured, and yet if we say something is a hundred years
ago, what exactly is that hundred years ago when it is past and
therefore doesn't exist at all? And since the present must become
past in order to be time (otherwise, it would be eternity), then if
"time present -- if it be time -- comes into existence only
because it passes into time past, how can we say that even this is,
since the cause of its being is that it will cease to be? Thus, can
we not truly say that time is only as it tends toward
nonbeing?" He then tries to further examine what exactly is
meant by the term "present", since the present cannot be
broken down and examined – is the present a second, a
nanosecond, less than a nanosecond? In truth the present has no
length at all, it can only be measured as it passes from future into
past – two states that do not actually exist – and
therefore, can it be said that the present actually exists at all?

After
all of these eye-crossing questions about the nature of time, it is
hardly surprising when Augustine says "And I confess to thee, O
Lord, that I am still ignorant as to what time is." And yet,
maybe time does exist somewhere: "Those who tell of things past
could not speak of them as if they were true, if they did not see
them in their minds ... My childhood, for instance, which is no
longer, still exists in time past, which does not now exist. But when
I call to mind its image and speak of it, I see it in the present
because it is still in my memory." In other words, the past does
exist, but in our memory, and further the future too exists in our
expectations – we know that the sun will rise tomorrow because
because it has risen every day in our memory. (Augustine also
speculates that those who claim to see the future may be experiencing
the future as the rest of us experience the past, but wisely offers
the caveat that he doesn't know if they truly see the future at all.)
Therefore, time is not something that exists in the physical world,
like a rock or a chair, but something that purely exists inside the
mind. Which leads to Augustine's most shattering revelation: "It
appears to me that time is nothing other than extendedness; but
extendedness of what I do not know. This is a marvel to me. The
extendedness may be of the mind itself."

Time may be an extendedness of the mind itself. After Augustine states this, he goes back, summarizes most of what he has said already and then praises God and Jesus for a while. It is disappointing that he does not take the implied consequences of time being simply a function of the mind further. In an Augustinian view, if time is merely a function of the mind, and all time extends from the eternal Word, then perhaps all consciousness is simply a splinter of the concept of time that exists in the mind of God – each of our individual consciousnesses a fragment of the eternal. In a modern physics view, if time is a function of consciousness, then perhaps time and consciousness are inextricably linked in the same way that we know time, gravity and matter are – in other words, perhaps consciousness is a thing itself – like gravity, like time – and, moreover, if this is so, then perhaps the eternal quantum singularity that created the universe is not only infinite in space and time, but also infinite in consciousness, and just as all space and time stems from it, all consciousness too flows from it, like water from a river.

It is likely that I'm stretching Augustine's theories of time here quite a lot, and my goal is not to form the basis of some new religious cult or new age fad belief, but simply to show that the exploration of the ideas discussed in Book 11 have far reaching implications which we, who don't actually understand time all that much better than Augustine did, have yet to completely examine. By trying to understand the nature of time itself for the first time, Augustine sent us on a path that we have yet to reach the terminus of, and the answers to the questions Augustine posed all those centuries ago may yet prove to reveal the very nature of reality itself.

WRAPPING IT UP:

As found in the above, time, as Augustine sees it, has three parts --- the past, the present and the future. And yet, according to how Augustine lays out time for us we also know that the past and future don't actually exist because we can in no way interact with them except when they are the present. That is to say, if the past and the future exist in the physical way that the present does, we have no way of knowing it, because we only experience the present. And yet, if the past and future don't exist, then what exactly are we measuring when we measure time? Obviously, time itself or something like it exists, since it can be measured, and yet if we say something is a hundred years ago, what exactly is that hundred years ago when it is past and therefore doesn't exist?

Since the present must become past in order to be time (otherwise, it would be eternity), then if time present comes into existence only because it passes into time past, how can we say that even this is, since the cause of its being is that it will cease to be?

"And yet, according to how Augustine lays out time for us, we also know that the past and future don't actually exist, since we can in no way interact with them except when they are the present."

Quite the loophole, the above, from even the farther above. How so a loophole? Would it not be so if you were to go back into the past or into the future, that either past or future you were in would then become your present, of which then you would be able to interact therein?

You and the present are inexorably entwined. Where you are is the present, regardless of the "where you are" as it relates to any given now or past or future that may or may not exist, have existed, or will exist. In a sense the present stays with you, where you go it goes. There is a difference, however, between your presence and THE present.

"On the morning of Good Friday, April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth went to Ford's Theatre to get his mail. While there, he was told by John Ford's brother that President and Mrs. Lincoln would be attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre that evening, accompanied by General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant."

A year and a half before, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, as the battles of the Civil War continued to rage on some miles to the south and west, Lincoln, delivered what has become known as the Gettysburg Address.

Booth, after being told the President would be attending the play at the Ford Theater as cited in the above quote, informed three of his associates who he had been plotting with all along, his intention to kill Lincoln that night. He assigned one associate to assassinate Secretary of State William H. Seward and a second to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson. The third was to target Ulysses S. Grant, the commanding general of the Union Army.

If John Wilkes Booth had afforded himself the presence of being within the crowd at the same time Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address a year and a half before, it isn't known and wouldn't matter much, at least as history has come down to us. On the other hand, even though he and Lincoln shared the same present all along, including at Gettysburg, if either Booth's or Lincoln's presence was such that one or the other or both was not at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. on the night of April 14, 1865 for any given reason, what would have happened none of us can be sure of as it didn't come down to us that way. We do know however, what happened with both their presence in the theater sharing the same present. Lincoln was shot and died the next day and Booth was the shooter.

Of the four assassins Booth was the only to succeed. One associate was able to stab Seward, and although Seward was badly wounded, he survived. The second associate never even made an attempt to kill Johnson, getting snockered out of his mind and spending most of the night passed out instead. The assassination of Grant didn't come off because he and his wife decided at the last minute to go by train that evening to visit relatives in New Jersey rather than go to the theater with the president.

If you traveled into the future relative to me and of which taken together was our present --- or collectively a given point we can give title to as THE present, a present we shared --- your presence would no longer be in my present. If you were to travel into the past relative to my present again your presence would not be in my present. But why should it be that MY present, where we were together initially, is or would be the dominant present, that is, predetermining where, when, and how your present would be THE correct or right present. If you are in the future or in the past and I am where I am you would just not be presence in my present. If we were together we would both be presence in the present. Or so it would seem.

However, if all that is ever going to happen has already happened relative to you (or us) it is no longer in the realm of the present, but in the past. If all events that are to or going to happen have not yet happened relative to you (or us) they are not yet in the realm of either the present or the past. The gossamer thin not-existent membrane that wafts along the disembarkation and arrival of the yet-to-happen and the already happened is where the present is found. Any movement in any direction up or down or away from there and you are somewhere else. Then there are the time paradoxes, paradoxes that do not fit nicely into predictable time realms, of which Augustine acknowledges but does not fully address. Paradoxes are however, for the most part mind games or what ifs. What if this happened or what if that happened, but not pulled into the conventional plain on a reality scale. Take for example the Bootstrap Paradox, followed then by a link that will take you to what would happen if such a paradox actually happened, and below that several "in real life" time paradoxes to ponder over:

"The Bootstrap Paradox as it is so called, is a time-travel paradox wherein an object or information can exist without ever seeming to have been created. The object or piece of information in the future is taken back in time where, through the normal passage of time from the past to the future, it is retrieved to become the very object or piece of information that was brought back in the beginning."

A TRUE LIFE TIME PARADOX (NUMBER ONE):

"There had to be in existence two of me at the same time, albeit occupying separate spaces. One of me quite possibly knowing my mother died, the other still having a mother alive."

The above sentence, based on a real life happenstance, is found in the text toward the bottom of The Spiritual Elder and the Santa Fe Chief. The seed of what is behind that happenstance and how it was able to come into play to such a point that it could, would and did actually transpire, was initially set into motion primarily through the downstream outflow of the following:

"(U)nknown to me, my mother was no longer at home, having become totally unable to care for herself, so much so my dad placed her into a full care sanatorium-like hospital in Santa Barbara, California on an around the clock basis. Before my dad had a chance to respond to the couple, the couple, knowing full well that my mother was in a sanatorium, without my father's grace, took me to India, simply sending him a note saying that in the end I had changed my mind about going. While I was gone my mother died. I missed the funeral and by the time I got back my family had disintegrated, my two brothers and myself all going separate ways, my dad disappearing into the countryside heavy into alcohol."

Traveling with the foster couple during the declining health of my mother but before her death put me as a young boy arriving at the ashram of the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi in Tiruvannamalai south India sometime in early January 1944 and staying to sometime after April of 1944. By all indications, as brought forth in the Raft Drift story as found in the sinking of the British motor vessel M.V. Tulagi I was most likely back in the states by June of 1944.

The M.V. Tulagi was attacked and sunk in the Indian Ocean by the German submarine U-532 March 27, 1944. Survivors, after 58 days adrift in the open sea, ended with only seven of the 15 crewmembers left alive that were able to make it into two lifeboats out of the original 54 crewmembers, landing on Bijoutier, a tiny island of the Alphonse Group belonging to the Outer Islands of the Seychelles.

Long after the sinking, but still well within the 58 day time period of the drift, I was returning to the United States onboard a ship in the Indian Ocean when some of the onboard passengers reported seeing a lifeboat sometime toward the end of May, 1944. If it was one of the rafts from the Tulagi, and I am almost sure it would have to have been because of it's description, it would put me back in the states sometime in June, 1944.(see)

The June, 1944 date is fairly solid assumption in that I was on my way to California from Pennsylvania via Chicago as a passenger on the all first class Santa Fe Chief being pulled by a powerful Baldwin built 4-8-4 Northern bearing the Santa Fe ID #3774. Outside Williams, Arizona, on the night of July 3, 1944, the train derailed in a high speed crash, killing the fireman and three passengers, while injuring 113 passengers and 13 train employees.

The wreck left whoever I was traveling with being either too hospitalized or too injured to oversee me. Because of same my uncle, who lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the closest relative to my location was contacted. While waiting for him to show up, which took a day or two longer than expected, he called a close-by tribal spiritual elder he knew to fill in for him until he was able to get to Williams. It is fair to say the spiritual elder sitting around inside of a train station all day long between the occasional train wasn't exactly what I would call his particular forte'. At the end of the second day, the spiritual elder seemed to have had enough and decided he needed more open space around him. Just after sundown of the second full day basically after just hanging around inside a stuffy train station or sitting on shipping boxes and crates in the shade along the wall of the loading dock, without any real discussion between us, we started walking eastward along the railroad tracks for some distance before turning south into the desert, the two of us ending up camping overnight along the Rio Felix in New Mexico.

The opening quote at the top of this section is from the source so cited. Although the paragraph is taken out of context having been extrapolated from a much longer text, it cuts to the quick quite clearly about my mother, the foster couple, me going to India, etc. It also brings to light the fact that while I was gone my mother died and I missed the funeral. It happened that way because of me having left for India late in the year 1943 and not returning to the states until June of 1944, meaning by inference according to the quote, that it was during that six month time frame that my mother died. Taken to the extreme then, by inference it would also mean that my mother was alive at least right up to my departure and possibly sometime shortly after. So too, most likely right up to my departure I was in the U.S. on U.S. soil because as I have stated elsewhere I went to Santa Barbara with both of my real parents sometime in 1943. The question is, if I was with my parents or even the foster couple how is it during the same 1943 period I was able to hole up for the night along the Rio Felix in New Mexico with the spiritual elder waiting for my uncle to show up? There had to be in existence two of me at the same time, albeit occupying separate spaces. One of me quite possibly knowing my mother died, the other still having a mother alive. Truth be told however, when I was traveling with the spiritual elder I had no clue it was not, not 1944. It was only years later that I discovered the incident along the Rio Felix involving the German POWs was 1943. Again:

"There had to be in existence two of me at the same time, albeit occupying separate spaces. One of me quite possibly knowing my mother died, the other still having a mother alive."(see)

Twenty years later, in 1964, thanks to the friendly Selective Service, or the draft as it is so affectionately known, found me as a fully ingrained member of the United States Army. During that time there was a similar or like event that harkened back to the year 1944 as well, albeit some weeks or months prior to the train wreck. Re the following from the source so cited:

"Everything in my life from before entering Laos to Chiang Mai to my eventual return to Rangoon and beyond, time-wise, led up to, overlaid and bracketed my stay at the monastery as outlined in Doing Hard Time In A Zen Monastery. Within that bracketed period of time at the monastery I came in contact with (the) woman at the farm house, ending up in Tiruvannamalai circa 1944 and the Ramana ashram. It was embedded inside that same period of time in Tiruvannamalai that the three hours sitting before the Maharshi in the ashram transpired. Added together, the whole of the whole episode that unfolded, at least outside of the monastery walls it would seem, and how time is typically constituted consensually by those in the Samsara world, was enveloped in the broader sense by the calendar year 1964."

"The thing is, even though I was drawing from history that hadn't even happened yet, they were in the process of putting into place what would happen that would eventually lead to that history, so they thought, knowing what they did from there own time, there was no way I could know what I knew if I wasn't one of them."

The above paradox is part and partial of The Code Maker, The Zen Maker because in the end it is directly related to my need to find a way to return to the monastery after finding myself suddenly out of nowhere at the ashram of the Bagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. Getting back to the monastery was the only way I could figure on how I could get back to my regular time.

When I was attending the U.S. Army Southeast Signal Corps School in Fort Gordon, Georgia, working on, refining, and increasing my Morse code technique and ability, we were continually told stories that no matter how sophisticated and advanced any radio communication equipment might be, when conditions for transmission get bad to worse, only Morse code gets through. A story one of my instructors continued to emphasize had to do with the clandestine communications networks set up by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in China during World War II, completely bypassing or duplicating established Army, Navy or commercial facilities. A U.S. military mission called the Dixie Mission went into Yenan north central China in July 1944 with the OSS in charge of communications. They immediately established radio communication with Chungking, a thousand miles to the south --- initially being able to do so only in Morse code. It was only later they received sophisticated, lightweight, radio transmitter-receivers developed by OSS that utilized voice.

Drawing from that information I learned from the Signal Corps School, after leaving the ashram in Tiruvannamalai and going to the U.S. Consulate in Madras, I told the military attache' that I was a member of a new OSS communications base being established at Chihkiang between Kunming and Chungking, all hush-hush. I told them I came to the consulate because of what happened after getting off a ship in Bombay and boarding a train to Calcutta with a ton of other G.I.s, none who I really knew except for a few I met on the ship. In the middle of the night a bunch of drunken soldiers got in a huge fight over a poker game, I got caught up in it and in the process thrown off or shoved through the window while the train was moving, not waking up until the next day with the train long gone as well as all my identification and duffel bag. After telling my story I was turned over to more covert types within the consulate and they contacted the OSS. The OSS, apparently buying my being thrown off the train story, said with all the information I have I must be one of theirs and to send me on through, only provide me with a cover, which they did. It took awhile, but a few weeks later I was a civilian CNAC mechanic on my way to Calcutta to catch a C-47 to Dinjan. Not quite the Himalayas, but closer to the monastery than I was.

Lets just say in more ways than one, returning in full to the monastery involved war torn Burma, the Japanese invasion of India, the crash of a C-47 high in the rarefied air in the Tibetan area of the Himalayas after being lost on that same aforementioned flight flight from Calcutta, and a U.S. Army captain who flew over the "hump" from China only to end up visiting the Ramana ashram at the same time I was there. That same captain, who had been called back into the Army to serve in the Korean War, during the throes of battlefield decimation going on all around him, as written in his tome A Soldier's Story, experienced a deep Spiritual Awakening not unlike those afforded the ancient classical masters.

Not long after I entered high school I began working part time running errands for a merchant marine who had been badly injured in the war. Ten years before that, in May of 1942, he was on a Liberty ship that was in the process of positioning itself to join a convoy somewhere off the southeast coast of Florida when it was struck by two torpedoes from a U-boat. In order to save himself he had no choice but to jump overboard, landing in an area with oil and naphtha burning along the surface of the water, the fire burning his skin and the heat scorching his lungs as he plunged through and returned for air.

He was found alive strapped by heavy ropes to a large piece of debris --- not along the east coast of Florida --- but in the north Atlantic, months and months later hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the site of the attack. An hour after his ship was hit, the U-333, the German submarine that unleashed the torpedoes, came alongside the lifeboats and offered assistance, but unanimously declined. My merchant marine friend doesn't remember being in a lifeboat or a submarine, so how he ended up in the North Atlantic alive months later is a total mystery.

On the same day he told me about being found floating in the middle of the ocean on a piece of debris he showed me a delicate gold necklace that had what looked like a small Chinese character dangling from it. He said one day in the hospital during recovery, while being given a sponge bath, he was looking in a hand mirror at his burn marks when he noticed the necklace around his neck. He never had a gold necklace in his life. When he asked the nurse where it came from she said as far as she knew he came in with it as it was found among the few personal effects he had with him. She said typically they would not put any jewelry on a patient but some of the staff thought that since he was so scarred by the burns that he might like a little beauty in his life so someone put it around his neck. He told me he had no clue where it came from or how it came into his possession, but for sure he didn't have it on before he was torpedoed. He said everybody always admired it and it appeared to be very ancient.

Ten years after I saw the necklace for that very first time, found me wolfing down a few drinks in a bar in the Cholon district of Saigon. Unsolicited, a young woman, affectionately known as a Saigon Tea Girl in those days, attempted to put what appeared to be a gold necklace around my neck. Hanging midway along the necklace was a small Chinese character. Basically grabbing the necklace from her hands I asked where it came from and how she got it. She turned facing a general group of barely discernible figures sitting and drinking toward the back of the barroom in the shadows along the darkened wall, telling me that one of the men, a burnt man, had paid her to put it on me. When I asked what she meant by a burnt man, using her hands in a swirling motion in front of her face she said in broken English, "burnt man, burnt man." In just the few seconds it took me to work my way through the crowd to the back wall pulling the tea girl with me the burnt man, if there ever was a burnt man, was gone. Nor could anybody at any of the tables remember seeing or talking to a heavily scarred man, burnt or otherwise, sitting at any of the tables --- although some of the GIs were fully able to recall the girl.

The necklace, which I still have and continue to wear to this day, from what I could remember, looked exactly like the one my Merchant Marine Friend showed me and said to be mysteriously wearing out of nowhere the day he was found floating in the sea after his ship was torpedoed. The only problem is, by the time the incident in the Saigon bar occurred my friend had already been dead some ten years, having passed away during the summer between my sophmore and junior years in high school. At his memorial service I was told by family members, following a death bed request on his part, that in an effort to rejoin his fellow seamen he wanted to be cremated and his ashes tossed at sea near where his ship was torpedoed and his necklace returned to the sea as well. As far as I know those wishes had been complied with.

During the high school years I worked for the merchant marine a man by the name of Bob Kaufman came by to see him several times. Kaufman had been in the merchant marines as well, and it was through that connection they knew each other. Kaufman was also an up and coming poet in what would soon come to be known as the Beat Generation, eventually his creativity being heralded in the movement right alongside with that of Allen Ginsberg.

A couple of years after high school Uncle Sam caught up with me and I was drafted. After Basic Training and Advanced Individual Training, in that I was in the Army shortly after the Bay of Pigs, and Cuba still reigned high in the minds of a large portion of the military hierarchy I was assigned to a number of Cuba related activities. Then, right in the middle of enlistment time John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In that LBJ wanted his own war everything was shifted away from Cuba to Southeast Asia.

Kennedy's was shot in November of 1963. By the second month of 1964, traveling light and wearing my Class A uniform per verbal orders, I boarded a train to Los Angeles, California, with the luxury of my own sleeping compartment and eating in the dining car before the hoi polloi got to. In the dark of the early morning hours, after the train stopped in Needles, I was told to shed my uniform and taken off the train by civilians as a civilian to Norton AFB near San Bernardino and from there flew to Travis AFB and taken to San Francisco for a flight to Hawaii and points west.

A short time later, after rout-stepping around Tan Son Nhut and visiting Saigon a few times, nearly always by myself and never having been officially assigned to a unit, albeit loosely affiliated with the 3rd Radio Research Unit for a place to bunk and eat, found me in a then developing secret base in Laos called Long Tieng, headquarters of an up and coming Laotian warlord --- with nobody knowing I was there and having bypassed basically all military paperwork and protocol --- albeit at first in the early days at least, sometimes, depending on the situation, everything fully Sheep-Dipped, i.e., fatigues with no patches, names or identifying marks.

Because of my top secret clearance and nearly unmatched code sending ability, I was assigned to an ill-defined group of U.S. Army personnel put on the ground in Laos and, because of which, following a series of extenuating circumstances, all or most circulating around the ill-defined group, a few select members of those already selective groups were appropriated for other duties. With me having met all of the necessary criteria big time, it wasn't long before I was under the umbrella of a questionable, semi extra-curricular so-said military activity ending up in the then drug infested wide-open railhead city of Chiang Mai located in the far northern reaches of Thailand.

After meeting a Buddhist monk in the city from China and me needing, or at the very least, having a strong requirement to make myself as scarce as possible as quickly as possible, as well as shaking off those who were on my tail, in what actually became an overkill of departure, the two of us left on foot traveling north high into the mountains through Laos, Burma, and on into the mountainous regions nobody knows who they belong to, basically retracing the steps of the ancient trade route known as the Chamadao that evolved from the even more ancient Silk Road.

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Days and days of walking later we ended up going our separate ways, he turning toward wherever he was going, me being left outside the ruins of a somewhat ancient if not actually ancient monastery perched precariously high up on the side of some steep Chinese mountain situated somewhere along the southern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. And there I sat. People from the village some distance below would come by to look at me or leave me water and food on occasion. Kids threw rocks at me, dogs pissed on me. After awhile someone gave me a blanket to wrap myself up with, but still I sat. Days, weeks went by.

One day when some monks came out of the ruins I got up and followed them into the fields hoping to pull something, anything, out of the ground to eat. They didn't stop at any fields but continued on, I just didn't have the strength to keep up with them over any distance. However, when they returned a short time later, like Dopey stomping along behind the other six dwarfs, I returned, entering the monastery in a single file line right along with them. In doing so, as a double set of rough hewn wooden doors, which hadn't been there previously, closed behind me, I suddenly found myself inside of a fully functional Zen monastery.

It is after passing through the forward walls of the ruins and finding a fully functional monastery on the other side of the doors that people start getting befuddled. If they don't totally dismiss what is being said, they lose the ability to grasp the concept. Once through the main portal the time associated within the walls of the monastery and the land beyond flowed like the surface of a Mobius Strip, non-orientable. From the monastery the next stop was the ashram of the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi in Tiruvannamalai, south India.

AND NOW, A TRUE LIFE TIME PARADOX (NUMBER THREE):

Typically, even with the prologue and the first two paradoxes, especially the second, no one can figure this one out.

Not long after Kaufman showed up in the general Los Angeles area than he began visiting my merchant marine friend. On one of the days Kaufman was visiting he noticed the necklace around the neck of the merchant marine. After asking him about it, then asking if it was OK to look at it, my friend, in that his hands were not nimble enough, had him remove it. Kaufman examined every minute detail. When he was done he handed the necklace back and told the merchant marine he was sure he had seen the exact same necklace once before. The merchant marine, so stunned it took what little air he had anyway away, gasping while searching for more air to respond, told Kaufman that was impossible because as far as he knew it was one of a kind, there was no other like it on our side of time. Kaufman told him some ten years before, during the early part of 1944, with the war still raging, he had sailed out of Philadelphia on board a Liberty ship headed toward India, ending up in Calcutta. He was stuck in Calcutta for about a month before being shipped out, sometime he thought, around the middle of May, 1944, albeit on a completely different ship than he came in on, called the S.S. Harold L. Winslow.

Kaufman said he had arrived in Calcutta on the S.S. James E. Eads, but missed shipping out because of a toothache. However, even before the toothache and the Eads leaving he said a man around 25 years old claiming he was an American soldier, although dressed in civilian clothes, came to the ship looking him. The man that claimed to be a soldier told him he knew that he, Kaufman, would be arriving in Calcutta onboard the Ead. Kaufman also said the soldier told him that the two of them had a mutual friend, another merchant marine, which just happened to be the same merchant marine he was visiting. Since Kaufman missed his ship and was stuck in Calcutta for who knew how long, he and the soldier, who he said, was waiting for a CNAC flight out over the "hump" to China, got together several times. It was during one of those times Kaufman first noticed the necklace and during one of those times he asked to see it, examining it very closely. He said, even though many years has passed since he had been in Calcutta and seen the necklace, it was so unique that there was no doubt that the one he saw that the soldier had and the one that he, the merchant marine was wearing, were exactly the same.

In Calcutta I was pretty much free to do whatever I wanted. I knew a friend of my merchant marine friend by the name of Bob Kaufman was due to arrive in on a Liberty ship on May 13, 1944. Since I had met him as well I decided to go down to the docks, locate his ship, and look him up. Which I did.

When I met Kaufman in Calcutta he was ten years younger than he was when I met him at my merchant marine friend's home in Redondo Beach. I remember well the day he was at the merchant marine's when I was in high school and Kaufman truly took notice of the the necklace for the very first time. He went over it the same way he went over it the day I was wearing it in Calcutta. It was easy to see as carefully as he went over the necklace in both cases that he determined it to be the same necklace, although from his perspective it couldn't be.

The Pope once asked Stephen Hawking not to try to inquire about what
happened before the big bang, and Hawking agreed, not because he
wanted to comply with the Pope's wishes, but because it is
fundamentally impossible to find out something that happened before
the literal beginning of time, since, as Augustine points out,
"there was no 'then' when there was no time". A good example of Augustine's rational and how he came up with what he did can be found in what has been termed by the Buddha as a "category mistake. Please see AVYAAKATA: The Buddha's Ten Indeterminate Questions.

Hence, it is clear that at least up until Thanksgiving 1943 my mother, father, two brothers and myself were all alive and well living together under one roof in Redondo Beach, California, my whole family intact and in place, happily sharing a Thanksgiving meal with neighbors. Seven months later, on my way back from India, I was waiting for my uncle in a train station in Williams, Arizona, following the wreck of a train I was a passenger on. Having survived the wreck, in due time I was returned to California and temporarily placed under the guardianship of my grandmother, re the following from the source so cited:

"There I was, a young boy barely even closing down on six or seven years of age, not long returned from India, without a mother, having missed both her final days and her funeral as well."

IF, as it seems, my family was alive and well and intact up until Thanksgiving 1943 living in our family home in Redondo Beach, it would be then a straight line given that ten months earlier, in January of that year, my mother would be alive as part of that same family. It would also hold true then that I, as part of that integrated family unit, would be fully aware of her being an active part of that family. The train wreck occurred July 3, 1944 after which I was placed with my grandmother, albeit without, as I write, a mother, having missed both her final days and her funeral as well.

It was because of the train wreck I met the Native American spiritual elder in the first place and having done so only for the first time because of the wreck. No wreck, no meeting, no spiritual elder. It was also because of the spiritual elder that I was camping along the Rio Felix and met the three German prisoners of war. In January 1943 I was with my mother in Redondo Beach, she being very much alive by all that I have presented. I was with the POWs along the Rio Felix in New Mexico because while heading home from India, trekking across the desert with the spiritual elder I ended up along the river, the prisoners having escaped January 14, 1943. On the way home from India on the train I missed both my mother's final days and her funeral as well, meaning at the time she was no longer alive, even though while along the Rio Felix, taken there by the spiritual elder and having missed both her final days and her funeral as well, in January 1943, she was still alive.